Only the weakest will have good reason to perform the second part of a covenant, and then only if the stronger party is standing over them. Yet a huge amount of human cooperation relies on trust, that others will return their part of the bargain over time.
A similar point can be made about property, most of which we cannot carry about with us and watch over. This means we must rely on others respecting our possessions over extended periods of time. One can reasonably object to such points: Surely there are basic duties to reciprocate fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner?
Even if there is no government providing a framework of law, judgment and punishment, do not most people have a reasonable sense of what is right and wrong, which will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned with? Indeed, should not our basic sense of morality prevent much of the greed, pre-emptive attack and reputation-seeking that Hobbes stressed in the first place?
He makes two claims. The second follows from this, and is less often noticed: it concerns the danger posed by our different and variable judgments of what is right and wrong. Naturally speaking—that is, outside of civil society — we have a right to do whatever we think will ensure our self-preservation.
The worst that can happen to us is violent death at the hands of others. If we have any rights at all, if as we might put it nature has given us any rights whatsoever, then the first is surely this: the right to prevent violent death befalling us. But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful. We do not just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: we each have a right to judge what will ensure our self-preservation. Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely.
Yet in the state of nature no one is in a position to successfully define what is good judgment. Others might judge the matter differently, of course. Almost certainly you will have quite a different view of things perhaps you were just stretching your arms, not raising a musket to shoot me.
Because we are all insecure, because trust is more-or-less absent, there is little chance of our sorting out misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we rely on some trusted third party to decide whose judgment is right. We all have to be judges in our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: life or death. For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that sound totally amoral. Hobbes is dramatizing his point, but the core is defensible. New readers of Hobbes often suppose that the state of nature would be a much nicer place, if only he were to picture human beings with some basic moral ideas.
Some think that Hobbes is imagining human beings who have no idea of social interaction and therefore no ideas about right and wrong. In this case, the natural condition would be a purely theoretical construction, and would demonstrate what both government and society do for human beings.
A famous statement about the state of nature in De Cive viii. Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more complex picture of human motivation, so that there is no reason to think moral ideas are absent in the state of nature.
The problem here is not a lack of moral ideas—far from it — rather that moral ideas and judgments differ enormously. This means for example that two people who are fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both think they are perfectly entitled to the object and both think they are perfectly right to kill the other—a point Hobbes makes explicitly and often. It also enables us to see that many Hobbesian conflicts are about religious ideas or political ideals as well as self-preservation and so on —as in the British Civil War raging while Hobbes wrote Leviathan , and in the many violent sectarian conflicts throughout the world today.
But what sort of ought is this? There are two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. This line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of Hobbes, but it faces serious problems, as will be seen. The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without problems either. This takes Hobbes to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of nature. We have a duty to do what we can to avoid this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all possible.
Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we have such moral obligations. But then two difficult questions arise: Why these obligations? And why are they obligatory? Hobbes frames the issues in terms of an older vocabulary, using the idea of natural law that many ancient and medieval philosophers had relied on. Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern some eternal principles to govern our conduct. These principles are independent of though also complementary to whatever moral instruction we might get from God or religion.
In other words, they are laws given by nature rather than revealed by God. But Hobbes makes radical changes to the content of these so-called laws of nature.
In particular, he does not think that natural law provides any scope whatsoever to criticize or disobey the actual laws made by a government. He thus disagrees with those Protestants who thought that religious conscience might sanction disobedience of immoral laws, and with Catholics who thought that the commandments of the Pope have primacy over those of national political authorities.
Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the first two that are politically crucial. The remaining sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated in the formula, do as you would be done by. While the details are important for scholars of Hobbes, they do not affect the overall theory and will be ignored here.
Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. Leviathan , xiv. This repeats the points we have already seen about our right of nature , so long as peace does not appear to be a realistic prospect.
The second law of nature is more complicated:. That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from the state of nature to civil society. But how he does this is misleading and has generated much confusion and disagreement.
But the problem is obvious. If the state of nature is anything like as bad as Hobbes has argued, then there is just no way people could ever make an agreement like this or put it into practice. That is: governments have invariably been foisted upon people by force and fraud, not by collective agreement.
His basic claim is that we should behave as if we had voluntarily entered into such a contract with everyone else in our society—everyone else, that is, except the sovereign authority. How limited this right of nature becomes in civil society has caused much dispute, because deciding what is an immediate threat is a question of judgment.
It certainly permits us to fight back if the sovereign tries to kill us. But what if the sovereign conscripts us as soldiers? What if the sovereign looks weak and we doubt whether he can continue to secure peace…? The sovereign, however, retains his or her, or their right of nature, which we have seen is effectively a right to all things—to decide what everyone else should do, to decide the rules of property, to judge disputes and so on.
Hobbes concedes that there are moral limits on what sovereigns should do God might call a sovereign to account. However, since in any case of dispute the sovereign is the only rightful judge—on this earth, that is — those moral limits make no practical difference.
In every moral and political matter, the decisive question for Hobbes is always: who is to judge? As we have seen, in the state of nature, each of us is judge in our own cause, part of the reason why Hobbes thinks it is inevitably a state of war.
Once civil society exists, the only rightful judge is the sovereign. If we had all made a voluntary contract, a mutual promise, then it might seem half-way plausible to think we have an obligation to obey the sovereign although even this requires the claim that promising is a moral value that overrides all others.
If we have been conquered or, more fortunately, have simply been born into a society with an established political authority, this seems quite improbable. Hobbes has to make three steps here, all of which have seemed weak to many of his readers. First of all, he insists that promises made under threat of violence are nonetheless freely made, and just as binding as any others. Second, he has to put great weight on the moral value of promise keeping, which hardly fits with the absence of duties in the state of nature.
Third, he has to give a story of how those of us born and raised in a political society have made some sort of implied promise to each other to obey, or at least, he has to show that we are bound either morally or out of self-interest to behave as if we had made such a promise. In the first place, Hobbes draws on his mechanistic picture of the world, to suggest that threats of force do not deprive us of liberty. Liberty, he says, is freedom of motion, and I am free to move whichever way I wish, unless I am literally enchained.
If I yield to threats of violence, that is my choice, for physically I could have done otherwise. If I obey the sovereign for fear of punishment or in fear of the state of nature, then that is equally my choice.
Such obedience then comes, for Hobbes, to constitute a promise that I will continue to obey. Second, promises carry a huge moral weight for Hobbes, as they do in all social contract theories.
The question, however, is why we should think they are so important. Why should my coerced promise oblige me, given the wrong you committed in threatening me and demanding my valuables? His theory suggests that in the state of nature you could do me no wrong, as the right of nature dictates that we all have a right to all things.
Likewise, promises do not oblige in the state of nature, inasmuch as they go against our right of nature. But as the sovereign is outside of the original contract, he sets the terms for everyone else: so his threats create obligations.
As this suggests, Hobbesian promises are strangely fragile. Implausibly binding so long as a sovereign exists to adjudicate and enforce them, they lose all power should things revert to a state of nature. Relatedly, they seem to contain not one jot of loyalty.
To be logically consistent, Hobbes needs to be politically implausible. Now there are passages where Hobbes sacrifices consistency for plausibility, arguing we have a duty to fight for our former sovereign even in the midst of civil war. Nonetheless the logic of his theory suggests that, as soon as government starts to weaken and disorder sets in, our duty of obedience lapses. That is, when the sovereign power needs our support, because it is no longer able to coerce us, there is no effective judge or enforcer of covenants, so that such promises no longer override our right of nature.
This turns common sense on its head. Surely a powerful government can afford to be challenged, for instance by civil disobedience or conscientious objection? But when civil conflict and the state of nature threaten, in other words when government is failing, then we might reasonably think that political unity is as morally important as Hobbes always suggests.
A similar question of loyalty also comes up when the sovereign power has been usurped—when Cromwell has supplanted the King, when a foreign invader has ousted our government. Perversely, the only crime the makers of a coup can commit is to fail. Why does this problem come about? All the difficulties in finding a reliable moral obligation to obey might tempt us back to the idea that Hobbes is some sort of egoist. However, the difficulties with this tack are even greater.
There are two sorts of egoism commentators have attributed to Hobbes: psychological and ethical. The first theory says that human beings always act egoistically, the second that they ought to act egoistically. Xautos View Profile View Posts. Riddly View Profile View Posts. Originally posted by ted :. Cougarific View Profile View Posts. Originally posted by Zuleica :.
Originally posted by Nanners :. Yep, as said by many above, hug the port side of the Aurora coming in the one facing your lifepod and hug it at the surface along to the bow. When you approach the exploded bow of the Aurora, you'll see gaps in the girders where you can slip your seamoth in.
Slip in and go right up the platform and park your seamoth on it. When you leave, do the reverse, if you hear a roar - don't look back, just shoot straight for home :. Remember a few updates back when creature tethers were broken and Reapers would follow you all the way back to your Lifepod?
Last edited by Cougarific ; 20 Jul, pm. Originally posted by Cougarific :. Fondrie will help Whitfield as he researches Teachers for a New Era. My research has taken me into the hard, complicated process of institutional reform. Selecting a research topic was easy for Whitfield because he said that many of his classes have covered ways to improve learning in districts like that of MPS.
Whitfield said social justice played a part because when he sees a district with problems, he wants to be part of the solution.
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